Artwork Details
Medium: Analog mixed media (custom aluminum pen, black ink, tissue paper collage)
Subject: A woman wearing a red tissue paper dress
Theme: The coexistence of passion and stillness, forms guided by materials
Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima
The Story
This was never meant to be a figure in a dress.
I picked up a sheet of red tissue paper that day, wanting only to run a black brush across it.
When the ink touched the paper, what came up wasn’t sadness or loneliness — something quiet and fierce at once. The brush kept moving with no sense of what shape would come of it. By the time it stopped, I knew: this was a dress. A dress carrying my own feeling. I wasn’t going to let it sit in a folder.
I picked up the aluminum pen. The pose that emerged was stiller than expected. But the expression held that same quiet, fierce feeling.
A day I was caught off guard by my own emotion driving the work.
Materiality & Context
I usually layer several colors onto the paper, but this time I decided from the start to work only in black — ink across red tissue paper. The tissue paper is an original material I make myself: painted with a brush, then torn by hand.
Its translucency absorbs the black ink, and where the two meet, a kind of rhythm settles onto the paper.
At that point the paper was still flat. I decided to shape it firmly along a body line into a dress, working creases into the thin, pliant red paper as I built the form.
During my modeling years, I watched designers do live draping countless times — a single piece of fabric becoming a garment with nothing but pins. My own process is two-dimensional, but I wanted to give it that same quality, as if my hands carried the same kind of skill.
The interplay of red and black here started from an image close to kabuki kumadori makeup. Red carries passion and life force; black defines its edge. This piece follows a similar structure — the emotion came first, in red, and the black followed to give it form.
The aluminum pen is a tool I made myself, shaped from folded aluminum sheet. The bleed and drag in its ink line — something no commercial pen produces — defines the quiet intensity of this figure.
In my Brush series, the material sometimes carries emotion before the drawing begins. This piece is one instance of that.
